Posts Tagged linux
It’s our fault.
The other night at the family Passover Seder, my sister innocently asked “So, have you heard of this Linux thing?” She said a friend was telling her about it, and when I acknowledged that I had indeed heard of it, she said, “So what’s up with that, is it really something anyone can use?”
It caught me completely off guard because I don’t usually hang out with people who ask that type question, and the complete sincerety and naívete of her phrasing made me burst out laughing.
Then my dad chimed in to ask if Linux had originally come from UNIX, to which my sister questioned, “aren’t those the guys who’ve had their testicles removed?”
The real shame here is that I’ve been a big geek for most of my life. I’ve mucked around in Linux since before GNOME was available. Are there still shortcomings? Of course, and they’ve been hashed out at length all over the place. And a lot of the major issues against “consumer adoption” can also be considered big advantages. All the different distributions cause confusion, the command line is still required, there’s no support for games and adobe blah blah blah…
Truth is, Linux is a viable option for a lot of people nowadays. We – those of us familiar with open source operating systems – know this. My sister hates the Vista installation that came preinstalled on her laptop. She’s told me this. There’s absolutely no reason she couldn’t switch to Ubuntu/Fedora/Take your pick today, other than needing a little helping hand from someone familiar with this strange new territory. But SHE had to ask ME about that Linux thing, and I responded with caution, skepticism, and laughter.
So it’s our fault. The nerds and the geeks out there who debate endlessly with themselves over whether Linux is ready for adoption. This article got a lot of press recently, and I have a lot of respect for the man behind the HeliOS project, and everyone who makes an effort to share their knowledge. For the rest of us, let’s stop thinking of our friends and relatives as incapable of being interested in an alternative operating system. With Live CDs and virtualization there’s really no excuse anymore. I know I’m guilty of it, and I’m going to start making a bigger effort. I’m not looking to convert people, I just want to give them options, which is really what this family of OSes has always been about.
And for those of you who have made the effort to share and inform, how has it gone? I’d love to hear about successes as well as failures, and maybe get some ideas on pitfalls to avoid when approaching this subject with non-geeks. I personally have a bad habit of getting too detailed when it comes to talking about techy things I’m interested in, which is an immediate turn-off to most people.
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I installed my ProClip phone mount in my car today and absolutely love it. ProClip makes custom mounts and holders for pretty much any car and mobile device out there. I emailed them shortly after getting my new HTC Evo because they didn’t have a holder for it yet, and was told that it was being worked on and I’d be notified when it was available.
Sure enough, I got an email yesterday letting me know they were in stock and could be ordered online, along with links directly to the product. I immediately placed my order.
Literally one day later, it was here. Yeah, it only shipped from Illinois to Michigan, but it was sent via ground (FedEx), and we’re talking about an order for a brand new item that was processed, fulfilled, and sent-out same day. Consider me seriously impressed.
And of course, the product itself is awesome. The mount for my car is designed to go on without damaging, marking, or even requiring any disassembly of the dash. It’s on there really solidly (I drove over some rough roads to find out), and the holder for the phone fits perfectly and is covered in a felt-like fabric so it won’t ever scratch the phone and dampens any vibrations even further.
Point is, if you use your mobile phone (or mp3 player) in your car for music/navigation assistant/stoplight entertainment (no texting while driving!), you should just buy a ProClip now. They’re not even expensive.
Dammit, tumblr
I want to like you, I really do. But seriously, this is getting frustrating.
I put things in the queue, and they don’t get posted.
I post things, and they don’t get forwarded to Twitter, or they do - twice.
I put things in the queue, they don’t get posted, so I remove them from the queue and manually repost them, and then they inexplicably show up in the queue again, where I delete them, only to have my manual post deleted as well. WTF?!?!
This kind of reminds me of Twitter’s growth phase (which is maybe still ongoing), where there’s random downtime, and sometimes some things are working while others are not. But look, you’ve been in the news recently for reaching the 1 Billion Posts milestone. I think we could all live with a little downtime here and there, but let’s fix the blatant and obvious bugs, k?
Editing tumblr themes
I just now figured out that you can directly edit the html/css of any tumblr theme. So that only took me like, what, two months? Progress people, progress.
In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
Hitchens on battling cancer. (via cajunboy) (via soupsoup)
Brilliant and jarring… For as long as it takes to read this essay, you will have his cancer. And when you are done reading it, you will not have it anymore. (Hopefully he won’t, either.) But what you will be left with in your newly-minted “still hopefully cancer-free” state of health is a better appreciation of your life.
(via jhnmyr)
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, “How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?
Man did this hit the nail on the head for me.
